About

Warren Zhu

Warren 朱富橙

I'm a senior at Harvard University and grew up in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. I want to build tools that help us learn, think, and be happy.

I love and hate modern technology, and I am especially skeptical of (social) science. I split my time between playing with new technology, reading about old ideas, and being (technology free) with loved ones.

If anything in these webpages provokes any thought, email me about whatever at wzhu@college.harvard.edu! For more formal details, you can view my resume.

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Education

  • Harvard University (Class of 2026)
    • B.A. in Computer Science
    • M.S. in Statistics
    • Secondary in Educational Studies

Current Projects

  • I’m working on Studio Tenwu with Matthew Kotzbauer. We want to reimagine K-12 education with Agentic AI, but to be completely frank, we do not know what we are doing and we are trying to learn as much as possible about K-12 and EdTech. We have ran a small experiment in PokeCraft.

ML Systems Projects

  • I’ve worked on the standardization of fault tolerance protocols for distributed ML. I presented “CRAFT: A Pytorch-based Protocol for Composing Fault Tolerance Techniques” (poster) as a poster in Pytorch Conference 2025, and I have contributed to torchFT to improve the fault tolerance of distributed ML systems.

Statistics Research

I did Harvard’s SPUDS during Summer 2024, sponsored by the great Xiao-Li Meng and under the incredible mentorship of Connor Jerzak. It appeared in clear2025.

Teaching

I had the pleasure to be a teaching assisstant for these wonderful courses:

Fall 2024: Course Assisstant for Stat188 (Variations, Information, and Privacy) under Prof. Xiao-Li Meng, with the Graduate Teaching Assistant Kyla Chasalow. Spring 2025: Course Assisstant for Stat111 under Prof. Joe Blitzstein, and Stat288 under Prof. Xiao-Li Meng.

I have also been tutoring highschoolers after seeing how helpful I could be to my sister in thinking through her academic and life choices. It has been even more fun than teaching college students!

Other Hobbies

I went to Harrow International School Hong Kong, where I had fond memories studying History, Drama, English, Music, and playing Badminton and Rugby. However, my experience with some of the bureaucracies there, as well as just being a child who was not suitable with the general educational system, left me deep scars and made me want to improve the educational experience of people for the better.

I had a lot of free time on my hand during COVID and spent a lot of time reading continental philosophy (Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Hegel, Kant, etc.). I won the Trinity College Philosophy Essay Prize for my essay on Social Media and Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Solitude. I was also highly commended in the Philosophy section of the John Locke Essay Prize for an essay on Heidegger and Morality.

I am a sucker for Wong Kar-wai movies and love Twin Peaks, Brideshead Revisited, and Yes, (Prime) Minister!.

Courses Taken at Harvard

For the interested, here are the technical courses I’ve taken at Harvard, listed in order of influence on me. For Harvard undergrads, feel free to email me about any of these courses!

Bachelors in Computer Science

GPA: 3.92

  • CS226 (Graduate: Distributed Systems): Only full mark Final project in the class on Fault Tolerance in Distributed ML
  • CS145 (Networking at Scale: Audited)
  • MIT6.S982 (Graduate: Deep Learning: Audited)
  • CS143 (Computer Networks)
  • MIT 6.5930 (Graduate: Hardware Architecture for Deep Learning)
  • CS61 (Systems Programming)
  • CS128 (Convex Optimization in Machine Learning)
  • CS2241 (Graduate: Algorithms at the End of the Wire)
  • CS124 (Algo. and Data Structures)
  • CS136 (Economics and Computation)
  • MIT 6.S98s (Graduate: Diffusion: Theory and Practice)

Masters in Statistics

GPA: 3.91

  • Stat220 (Graduate: Bayesian Data Analysis)
  • Stat288 (Graduate: Deep Learning and Earth Observation)
  • Stat188 (Differential Privacy)
  • Stat210 (Graduate: Probability Theory I)
  • Stat212 (Graduate: Probability Theory II)
  • Stat211 (Graduate: Statistical Inference I)
  • Stat242 (Graduate: Time Series)
  • Stat111 (Statistical Inference)

Math

GPA: 3.92

  • Math55a/b (Honors Real/Complex Analysis and Linear Algebra)
  • Math123 (Algebra II: Groups and Rings)

Bad Courses

I have had the pleasure of attending courses (to complete graduation requirements) that I very much disliked. Weirdly, they helped me understand myself more than the good courses, via negativa. Here is a thank you list:

  • Expos20: Is it Okay To Be A Luddite (Compulsory Writing Course)
  • CS1060: Software Engineering with GenAI (I love Christopher but I don’t think Software Engineering should be teached. There were also so, so many tiny quizzes and attendance and homework it was dystopian.)

Unintuitively Great Courses

  • SLAVIC148: Strange Russian Writers (Has the best reading list ever and makes me want to goto all Soviet Bloc countries)
  • GENED1136: Power and Politics, China (Wow. Kirby and Bol are really, really knowledgeable. They helped me appreciate the greatness of true historians. It is also a refreshingly rigorous GENED.)
  • STAT288: Deep Statistics. (Xiao-Li is GOATED).
  • COMPSCI143: Computer Networking. (Networking is beautiful, and HT Kung is legendary.)

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